American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Partnerships with Ed Tech Companies, 2022-25: What We Know So Far

Summary

Since 2022, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has engaged in “partnerships” with at least half a dozen educational technology (EdTech) companies, most of which have explicitly or implicitly stated that they hope that AFT can enlist its 1.7 million members to introduce generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools into classrooms across the United States.

 

Here is a short list of potential conflicts of interest produced by AFT's EdTech partnerships:

• AFT has advertised free trial subscriptions to EdTech software to its members
• AFT has provided grants to school districts to train teachers on how to use AI tools– and the funding for those grants may have come from EdTech companies
• AFT’s ShareMyLesson.com promotes and facilitates the incorporation of generative AI tools into teachers’ work, hosts seminars for teachers with EdTech company staff to discuss their AI tools, posts about specific companies’ tools, and in some cases allows those companies to post directly to the web site
• AFT has co-sponsored symposia with EdTech companies, whose co-sponsorship likely includes financial underwriting, where EdTech staff meet directly with school teachers to discuss their products
• AFT has accepted over $20 million over the next 5 years from EdTech companies to create a “National Academy for AI Instruction” located in the headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City.

Information on AFT's EdTech partnerships is scant. Neither the contracts between parties nor a full accounting of the flow of money, goods and services between parties has been made public.

The information provided below comes entirely from public sources. I have compiled it to help inform discussions by AFT union members and their elected officers about whether and how AFT should be partnering with EdTech companies. I hope that it can also be a useful resource for journalists and other researchers. 

AFT Partnership with NewsGuard, 2022

On January 25, 2022, AFT announced what it called a “pathbreaking licensing agreement” with NewsGuard, a software company that promises to help people debunk and learn about the dangers of misinformation. The agreement allowed teachers and students free access to NewsGuard. But conversely, to use NewsGuard, teachers and students would have to install the NewsGuard extension on their web browsers, effectively giving NewsGuard access to their web search and usage data.

It’s not clear how much money, if any, AFT gave to or received from NewsGuard as part of its partnership. Either way, AFT had effectively endorsed and publicized the software to as many as 1.7 million members, setting a pattern for its future partnerships.

In 2023, UC Santa Cruz faculty and UC-AFT members Nolan Higdon and Susan Maret publicly opposed AFT’s partnership with NewsGuard. Writing for Project Censored, they criticized NewsGuard’s leadership as operating “counter to the principles of democratic education and interests of organized labor.” And they argued that it would be more effective to teach students “critical news literacy” rather than outsource news evaluation to a for-profit corporation.

AFT Partnership with GPT-Zero, 2023

On October 11, 2023, AFT announced the expansion of its partnership with NewsGuard to also include free trials to GPT-Zero, a tool for teachers to supposedly differentiate writing produced by generative artificial intelligence (AI) and writing produced by humans. GPT-Zero hailed the partnership as “the first of its kind between an AI technology company and a teachers union with over a million members.”

According to CBS News, “The teacher's union is paying [GPT-Zero] for access to more tailored AI detection and certification tools and assistance,” but it didn’t report how much AFT was paying or how long its contract was for.

There hasn’t been a great deal of discussion inside or outside of AFT about its partnership with GPT-Zero. But a number of EdTech promoters, who want schools to do more to incorporate generative AI tools into their curriculum, have criticized the partnership, pointing out that GPT-Zero, like other plagiarism detectors that don’t rely upon generative AI, is very unreliable.

The day after AFT announced its partnership with GPT-Zero, AFT explained in a press release that its EdTech partnerships were part of a broader project to provide “guardrails” for all education technology, in response to recent polling suggesting that most teachers want “guardrails for kids’ use of social media.”

And on October 15, 2023, capping off a week of AFT press releases about its engagement with the issue of the role of generative AI in education, the New York Times published an op-ed by AFT President Randi Weingarten describing some of the promises and perils of generative AI tools, positioning herself and AFT as thought leaders on the subject.

AFT Partnership with Microsoft Begins December, 2023

On December 11, 2023, Microsoft and the AFL-CIO both announced what Microsoft called a 

new partnership to create an open dialogue to discuss how artificial intelligence (AI) must anticipate the needs of workers and include their voices in its development and implementation. This partnership is the first of its kind between a labor organization and a technology company to focus on AI and will deliver on three goals: (1) sharing in-depth information with labor leaders and workers on AI technology trends; (2) incorporating worker perspectives and expertise in the development of AI technology; and (3) helping shape public policy that supports the technology skills and needs of frontline workers.

Microsoft explained that the partnership would include 

1. “learning sessions that will take place during the winter of 2024 facilitated by Microsoft’s AI experts,” that would be “augmented by on-demand digital resources that labor leaders and workers can access online”;

 

2. “Microsoft hosted labor summits” that would supposedly help “co-design and develop ‘worker-centered technology’”; and 

3. “new content and professional learning opportunities to prepare workers for the future workplace” produced by a joint partnership between Microsoft and the AFL-CIO Technology Institute.

The AFL-CIO also noted that this partnership included a commitment by Microsoft to remain neutral in any current or future organizing campaigns by unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

Both the AFL-CIO and Microsoft announced an additional partnership between AFT and Microsoft using identical language. According to their press releases,

Working with the American Federation of Teachers, Microsoft will explore joint opportunities for career and technical education work that prepares students for high-paying jobs of tomorrow. In addition, they will hold deep-dive and experiential workshops starting 2024 through 2026 that will be tailored to specific careers and roles.

AFT did not issue a press release in December, 2023 about its partnership with Microsoft. There is no record of public announcements by either AFT or Microsoft about the “Microsoft hosted labor summits” that were supposed to take place in Winter, 2023-24, or what happened at them, or who paid for the expenses of labor leaders who attended them.

AFT President Explains EdTech Partnerships, January 2024

About a month after the announcement of the Microsoft partnership, AFT President Randi Weingarten explained in a panel discussion with other labor leaders why she chose to develop partnerships between AFT and EdTech companies. The discussion took place as part of SAG-AFTRA’s fifth annual Labor Innovation and Technology (LIT) conference in Las Vegas on January 23, 2024. AFT was a co-sponsor of the conference. According to President Weingarten,

What has happened in terms of education is that it's a different kind of story about how people tried to, how big tech tried to replace us. About 20 years ago, there was this big replacement push from the non-AI version of technology. Because most of the billionaire class actually believe in something that is really sickening to me, which is they believe that if you can't, you teach. And they are really disparaging about teachers. And so they thought that they could replace us: [teaching] aides and others. 

What happened in terms of the EdTech field. And immediately, a lot of our members were very upset and reactive to it, even though now, frankly, 70% of our members use tech every single day. Every single day. But what essentially happened was that they couldn't replace us. At least not in K-12. And when they tried, they did it badly. They're still trying. 

But what many of us learned, and I have a bunch of [AFT] staff members here who were part of that process, is that if we try to create the power of design and the power of working with— even though we may really hate this billionaire class— but if we actually start engaging with and working with and trying to understand that you can work with people, even if you don't like them, that we have to engage in that real way. And we have to engage in the design. But we also have to engage in the education. Because if you are actually only on the receiving end of doing the impact of, or the implementation of, as opposed to really feeling the confidence of understanding the right questions to ask, and that was a really important piece.

So the [AFT] partnerships [with EdTech companies] came from the fact that EdTech tried to kill us. They couldn't. They realized to make money, they had to actually work with educators, and we understood that that was important to do that work.

Now, last thing I'll say is the “oh shit!” moment for me was EdTech and technology in itself is quite different than generative AI. Because at the end of the day, this is not simply a matter of— I mean, there's all the issues about displacement, there's all the issues about disinformation, there's all of the issues about privacy and all of the tools, all of those issues— but at the end of the day, the "oh shit!" moment for me was if we do not actually understand how to master these tools, and have the power of being a voice at the table, human beings will not run the world, but machines will. So our “oh shit!” moment now, and opportunity moment now, is that human beings need to run the world, not machines. 

So I end by saying, it's not simply collective bargaining, but it is society. And we, as a labor movement, who represent the workers of society and civilized society, we have an obligation to harness what we see so that human beings will run this world, a world that hopefully will also have a sustainable climate and a democracy in this country. 

Microsoft Partnership with KhanAcademy Begins, May 2024

On May 21, 2024, Microsoft and KhanAcademy announced a partnership through which Microsoft technology would “power” KhanAcademy’s new generative AI tool for teachers, called “Khanmigo”, and make it “100% Free for All U.S. Teachers.” While teachers have free access to Khanmigo for now, KhanAcademy’s website notes that student and parent access still requires “a recurring payment.”

KhanAcademy describes Khanmigo as an “AI-powered teaching assistant.” KhanAcademy founder Sal Khan described Khanmigo to BBC in ways that specifically imagine replacing teachers’ aides in K-12 and teaching assistants in college: 

Imagine if your child's school district just discovered a billion dollars and they decided to hire some amazing graduate students to hang out in the classroom. And so every classroom is going to get four or five of these graduate students and these graduate students are going to be on call for your teacher… to help grade papers, to help bounce ideas, think of really creative lesson plans. When class starts, the class is now going to be much more interactive. It's not just going to be a teacher lecturing to the students. Those three, four, five grad students along with the teacher are going to be able to walk around help your children when they need it. They don't have to wait for that help but then report back to the teacher… like a professor would have in a large lecture hall at a large university… 

That would be everyone’s dream. The students would love it, the teachers would love it, and the parents would love it. And that’s essentially what’s going to happen with AI.

AFT doesn’t just represent K-12 school teachers, K-12 classified staff, college professors, librarians, government employees and even nurses and police. AFT was the first labor union in the US to represent graduate student teaching assistants in the 1960s, and it represents thousands– and possibly tens of thousands– of teaching assistants across the U.S. today. 

With regard to K-12, making the implicit explicit, a BusinessInsider story about Khanmigo described it as a potential solution to problems produced by “heavy workloads and minimal pay” for teachers.

AFT “Guardrails” Report Issued, June 2024

On June 18, 2024, AFT announced that an Ad Hoc Committee on Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom– made up of 67 AFT members from around the country– had issued a report that it called “Commonsense Guardrails for Using Advanced Technology in Schools.” 

Despite AFT’s partnership with GPT-Zero, the report was fatalistic about whether generative AI should have any place in schools at all, declaring that “Technology will never, and should never, replace human interaction; nonetheless, we must adapt and integrate it into our work.” 

Having declared that generative AI could not and will not “replace human interaction”, the report focused on curriculum issues (the craft of teaching) instead of labor issues (working conditions).

AFT Innovation Fund Spending on Education Technology, 2024-25 School Year

As part of announcing the publication of the guardrails report, AFT stated that “through its Innovation Fund, the 1.7 million-member union is investing over $200,000 in 11 school districts across the country to fund solutions to incorporating, understanding and regulating AI, drawing inspiration from members on the ground.” Not all of the grants awarded in 2024 focused on AI. But some did. And in those cases, AFT was effectively paying for teacher training on how to use generative AI tools.

AFT has historically used its Innovation Fund to channel outside grant money to union affiliates and initiatives. AFT created its Innovation Fund the same year that it began receiving grants between 2009-14 from the Gates Foundation that totaled over $7.3 million. Gates Foundation money flowed into the Innovation Fund during that time, and then AFT distributed the money from the Fund to union locals and initiatives. Gates Foundation staff called AFT President Randi Weingarten “an important thought partner.” But according to Politico, President Weingarten announced the end of AFT’s partnership with the Gates Foundation in 2014 after “rank-and-file union members expressed deep distrust of the foundation’s approach to education reform.”

Therefore, when AFT announced that it will distribute $200,000 in grants to school districts from its Innovation Fund to train teachers to learn about and even “incorporate” AI tools into teaching, it raised the possibility that the $200,000 is from an outside source.

The timing of the announcement raises the possibility that this outside source is Microsoft. For the 2023-24 school year, AFT’s web site described innovation fund grants as being used to

… address the systemic challenges school districts face, such as critical shortages of educators, and they look forward to meeting the promise of what students can become through investments in career and technical education. They expand on promising methods of community inclusion, such as community schools, and they deepen our commitments to literacy education.

For the 2024-25 school year, after the Microsoft deal was announced, the language changed to solicit proposals for “real solutions to education technology.” As of August, 2025, the page has not been updated to solicit grants for the 2025-26 school year. Perhaps coincidentally, Microsoft money now seems like it will be flowing to a different initiative through AFT and its New York City affiliate.

AFT revised the “guardrails” report in March, 2025 to include descriptions of some school districts’ uses of AFT Innovation Fund grants.

The nature of the Innovation Fund and the timing of its shift to focus on AI for 2024-25 do not prove that Microsoft is using AFT as a means to market Microsoft’s generative AI products to school teachers, staff and students– making it appear that teachers are clamoring for AI independently of any corporate search for profits. But the possibility that AFT is being used in this way demonstrates the need for greater transparency from AFT leaders about all of their EdTech partnerships.

AFT Resolution on Artificial Intelligence, July 2024

At its Convention in July, 2024, AFT delegates passed a resolution on “Artificial Intelligence” that promoted having “a union seat at the table during the development, procurement and implementation of comprehensive, forward-looking regulations and policies” related to AI, and stated that AFT would “proactively engage with” a variety of “stakeholders”— including “technology developers”— to “establish clear, ethical guidelines and standards for the use of AI.” 

Because the resolution did not specifically mention AFT’s partnership with Microsoft, one has to read a lot into the meaning of the phrase “proactive engagement” to argue that AFT delegates authorized its leadership to accept money directly from EdTech corporations or any other “stakeholders” in the development or adoption of generative AI into schools.

Because AFT Executive Council meeting minutes are not available to the public, it’s not clear if or how Executive Council members were included in AFT’s decisions to partner with EdTech companies.

AFT/ Microsoft Symposium on AI in Education and Beyond, August 2024

From August 11-13, 2024, AFT and Microsoft held the “AFT/ Microsoft Symposium on AI in Education and Beyond.” According to AFT, the symposium was cosponsored by “TeachAI, Khan Academy and NewsGuard.”

This was the first time that AFT publicly identified that it had a relationship with TeachAI– a non-profit organization founded by the EdTech-funded Code.org. TeachAI describes its mission as “Empowering educators to teach with and about AI.” [emphasis in original] Both AFT and the National Education Association (NEA) are listed as serving on its advisory board.

At the Symposium, AFT members from around the U.S. discussed AI tools with Microsoft and Code.org employees. The description by AFT of a zoom panel that took place as part of the Symposium further adds to the possibility that AFT’s Innovation Fund is channeling Microsoft money to school districts: 

Weingarten moderated a Zoom conversation with San Antonio’s Northside AFT President Melina Espiritu-Azocar and United Teachers of Wichita (Kan.) President Katie Warren, whose AFT-Microsoft partnerships have energized their members and districts. (The AFT is devoting hundreds of thousands in grants to locals across the country to fund solutions to understanding, incorporating and regulating AI.)

AFT’s description of the Zoom conversation also suggested that co-sponsoring forums on AI in red states can be a way for AFT locals to increase their membership and build their power:

Espiritu-Azocar’s local and Microsoft co-sponsored a standing-room-only professional development session on AI in June [2024]. The potential for collaborating with the district on AI has fostered good labor-management feeling, which is especially important in a “right to work” state. AI is also a great organizing issue: The local signed up three members at its professional development session.

Building on the theme that unions could build worker power through partnerships with EdTech, AFT social media shared a picture from the symposium of AFT members wearing t-shirts that read in bold letters “a Seat at the Table”, with smaller letters underneath saying “COLLECTIVE BARGAINING.” The message reinforced AFT’s description of its EdTech partnerships as providing AFT members with a “seat at the table” in AI development and adoption.

Microsoft public relations later described the Chicago symposium as a means to serve its broader goals of “empowering educators and enhancing the learning experience through innovative technology.” AFT’s description was a bit less boosterish, acknowledging both “pitfalls and promise.”

It is likely that “cosponsorship” of the Symposium included corporate underwriting of at least some and possibly all event expenses. During the conference, AFT acknowledged on X.com that “Microsoft provided financial support for a portion of our work to ensure that AI tools are developed in partnership with educators who can best articulate the challenges and opportunities of using these resources in the classroom.” AFT has never publicly disclosed exactly how much “financial support” it has received from Microsoft or other EdTech companies, and for which “portion of our work”, though it was willing to share some information with the New York Times in July, 2025.

AFT Partnership With OpenAI Begins, Fall, 2024

According to New York Times, “After Ms. Weingarten met last year [2024] with Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, the union also began working with OpenAI.” On December 11, 2024, AFT initiated its new “AFT/OpenAI Professional Learning Series” for educators with a session called “Educators Utilizing AI with Integrity."

AFT, ShareMyLesson.com, and AI, 2024-25

According to MIT researchers in 2014, AFT’s website for K-12 instructors, ShareMyLesson.com, started as part of an emerging “lesson sharing” movement that the researchers claimed had the “potential to revolutionize how teachers plan and deliver lessons” if merged with “lesson study.” Within its first year, the web site claimed to have as many as 250,000 different lessons.

What started as “lesson sharing” has evolved during the period of AFT’s EdTech partnerships into something that blurs the line between teacher training and software marketing. 

KhanAcademy already had “Teacher” posting privileges at ShareMyLesson.com before 2022, which it used to post almost 3,000 different resources to the site. Since AFT partnered with Microsoft in 2023, KhanAcademy has been able to post directly to the site about its Khanmigo chatbot. Multiple posts by AFT staff have also included Khanmigo as part of a set of AI tools that teachers may consider using. 

Microsoft software has been featured in thousands of posts on ShareMyLesson.com, many if not most of which predate the 2023 AI partnership between Microsoft and AFT. At some point, Microsoft Education became an official “partner” of ShareMyLesson.com, which entitles it to post directly to the AFT-run web site for K-12 teachers. It has posted 7 times so far. 

ShareMyLesson.com also includes lesson plans created by a ChatBot created by AFT staff called “EdBrAIn”, which has posted nine lessons for K-12 teachers to use so far, effectively modeling how ChatBots can be used to do teachers’ work for them.

The National Academy for AI Instruction, 2025

On July 8, 2025, AFT announced its largest partnership yet with EdTech companies: the creation of a “National Academy for A.I. Instruction”, incorporated into the professional development center and headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT)-- the New York City AFT union local that has used its enormous size to control the national AFT since its 1969 convention.

According to the AFT press release about the Academy, “The groundbreaking $23 million education initiative will provide access to free AI training and curriculum for all 1.8 million members of the AFT, starting with K-12 educators.” 

According to the New York Times, the Academy will be funded by $12.5 million from Microsoft and $10 million from OpenAI spread across the next five years, plus $500,000 from Anthropic in 2025. The next day, the New York Times reported that Microsoft’s $12.5 million donation to AFT was just part of a broader investment of “more than $4 billion in cash and technology services to train millions of people to use artificial intelligence.”

Microsoft praised the Academy for the impact that it could have in possibly educating all K-12 teachers represented by AFT in the U.S. about how to use AI tools in their classrooms. The company called the Academy “a national model for AI-integrated curriculum and teaching that puts educators in the driver’s seat… The academy will begin instruction later this fall and then scale nationally. Over five years, the program aims to support 400,000 educators— approximately 10% of the U.S. teaching workforce— reaching more than 7.2 million students.”

OpenAI similarly praised the AFT and the Academy for “lead[ing] the way in shaping how AI is used and taught in classrooms across the country.”

The idea for an AFT-run K-12 teacher training center funded by EdTech companies and focused on generative AI tools came from Ray Bahat, the head of Bloomberg Beta, “an early-stage venture fund backed by Bloomberg investing in startups focusing on machine learning and the future of work.” Bahat teaches as a lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Business, and is a dues paying member of the University-Council American Federation of Teachers (UC-AFT), AFT Local 1474.

According to Bahat, after studying union training centers connected to union apprenticeship programs for culinary workers and the building trades, he successfully pitched the idea directly to AFT President Randi Weingarten and Rob Weil, Director of AFT Field Programs, even though the training would not be related to an apprenticeship system. This conversation took place at the sixth annual LIT conference in Las Vegas in January, 2025. 

In an interview with Time, Ray Bahat expressed a vision of the future for schools that overlapped with that of the tech companies he helped AFT partner with: “While it’s great that every school has a few teachers who are experimenting aggressively and lots of folks who are trying to figure out what to do, ultimately it needs to be a widespread expectation that every teacher has available to them the ability to get smart on the use of technology.”

Bahat is the only person who has so far been named as a Board member of the new Academy. It’s unclear how much he and other Board members will be paid, if anything. The Academy’s web site is currently a placeholder, and there is no publicly available information about what structure it will have. 

AFT Doesn’t Need EdTech Money

AFT is not an organization that financially needs Microsoft to give it a couple million dollars a year to improve its professional development programs or set up a state-of-the-art computer lab in New York City.

According to AFT’s Department of Labor filings, AFT ran a $3 million budget surplus between July 1, 2023 and July 1, 2024. It received $220 million in dues from its members, had more than $18 million in cash on hand (a relatively small amount for an organization its size), and $60 million in investments.

So why is AFT having EdTech companies pay for AFT's programming for teachers about generative AI? Especially when these companies have a profit motive to seek changes in education that may not necessarily be good for students, teachers, or schools?

The argument for the partnerships put forward by AFT leaders is that they provide AFT members with a “seat at the table” for the development of “guardrails” for education technology. But while Microsoft gives lip service to this message of teacher empowerment, OpenAI and Anthropic do not even pretend that they are ceding any power to AFT in the process of helping them set up a technology lab in New York City.

AFT members have a diverse range of opinions about whether and how generative AI tools should be incorporated into their work. For that range of opinions to be truly respected, without being undercut by any financial conflicts of interest, and for AFT members to have a “seat at the table” in the decision-making within their own union, AFT needs to refuse donations from EdTech companies now and into the future.